176,052 Tips to Improve Your Resume

Resumes are extremely important. Those crisp white pages are your best chance at making a strong and lasting first impression.

A good resume means that you won’t get the job because it will go to someone who is much more qualified than you or is an internal candidate or otherwise has some sort of in at the company. A bad resume means the same thing, just with the added bonus of making you a shitty person.

So in order to help you climb into the former category, we here at the Fred Needles Blog have compiled 176,052 tips and tricks to help you create the best possible resume. Enjoy!

1. Proofread

I know what you’re thinking: “wow, I never thought to proofread my resume before. Literally no one ever mentioned that! And here I’ve been going over my resume and actually adding typos where possible so as not to come off as too much of a try-hard. Thanks Fred Needles blog!”

2. Lose the Objective(ly obvious bribery in favor of more subtle means)

If your resume doesn’t have an objective, good. If it does, try tweaking the objective so that your begging, bribery, or extortion are a bit less conspicuous. Subtlety is key:

Rather than: Give me this job or I will release the photos I stole when I hacked your cloud.

It’s much more literary — hello showing not telling that you have writing skills! — and will help shield you from potential legal action. Hello killing two birds with one stone!

3. Put Good In…

I recently read this advice on a Forbes.com post about LinkedIn profiles, and the advice applies to resumes as well. It read:

“[Include] Your most important accomplishments. Write a sentence for each one in terms of the value you create/created (‘I saved my company $500k in returned products by ensuring customer satisfaction on the front-end of the transaction; I built our first world-class customer service team from the ground up.’)”

I know exactly what you’re thinking: “Wow, I also saved my company $500,000, but I never thought of putting that in my resume.”

It’s true, many people have saved their companies hundreds of thousands of dollars yet sadly neglect to put that into their resumes. Now you don’t need to be one of those people! The trick is to call attention to your earth-shatteringly impressive professional successes because obviously you totally have some and that’s why you’re unemployed and literally fucking googling “resume tips.”

4. Include a Link to Your Personal Computer’s Browsing History

A resume is a one dimensional (technically two dimensional) representation of yourself, and that’s not enough anymore. Companies want to know the whole you — what you like, what you dislike, what you search when you’re home alone and lonely late at night. Linking to your Facebook and Twitter are a start, but I would say just go ahead and send them your entire browser history.

5. Grovel

Not enough people grovel anymore. And I mean really grovel, not this grovel-lite that seems to have infected this new generation. Whatever happened to just a real solid, just completely depraved, just totally self-negating grovel? Damn I miss the old days.

6. Politics and Religion — Still a No-Go?

This is a toughie, but I’m saying that politics and religion are… IN PLAY, BABY! This isn’t your mom’s repressed America! It’s the 21st century, and companies want to know everything about you (see #4). That’s why I like to lead off my resume with my name, email, phone number, and my stance on abortion.

Has it worked? Well I haven’t gotten a job yet, but there’s no definitive proof that my musings about the relative humanity of a fetus have been the reason! Correlation, sure, but no causation; it hasn’t not gotten me a job…

7. First Person or Third Person? Split the Difference

There are advantages to writing in the first person (narrative flow, personality) and also to writing in the third person (objectivity, workman-like-ness), but if you can’t choose one or the other, I would suggest taking the middle course: try writing your resume in the second person.

Rather than (first person) I saved the company $500,000 or (third person) Saved the company $500,000, try writing it in second person: You saved the company$500,000.

This way you add some personality to your resume — and the personality is that of the person reading the resume! The HR person may get confused and think that it is she herself who is applying for the position, and she may then be more likely to choose to hire herself (who is really YOU). You’re in.